TP-Link’s Tapo C200 flagged for hardcoded keys and buffer overflows - with real privacy fallout

Security researchers have disclosed that TP-Link’s Tapo C200 ships with hardcoded cryptographic material and is vulnerable to buffer overflow bugs in its network-facing services. Under the hood, that’s a two-front problem: shared secrets undermine any claim of device-specific trust, making impersonation and traffic decryption feasible at scale, while memory corruption in parsers (think HTTP/ONVIF/control daemons) opens the door to code execution from the local network and, if exposed, the wider internet. What’s notable here isn’t novelty but composition-weak key management lowers the bar for attackers, and unsafe C paths without modern mitigations (stack canaries, ASLR, RELRO) make exploitation more reliable on resource-constrained firmware.

The bigger picture: this is the IoT story on repeat. Fleet-wide keys and brittle parsers are precisely what regulators (EU CRA, US IoT labeling) and enterprise buyers want stamped out in 2025: per-device keys provisioned at manufacturing, encrypted update channels with verified signatures, and services fuzzed continuously. Worth noting for owners: update the firmware promptly, disable UPnP/port forwarding, isolate cameras on a VLAN, and prefer local-only control with outbound rules if your setup allows. For vendors, this is a reminder that “secure by default” isn’t a slogan-it’s unique credentials, memory-safe components where possible, and crash-tested endpoints before shipping. The privacy stakes aren’t abstract; when a camera falls, so does the room it watches.